Fish and Sky, from the portfolio Ten From Leo Castelli

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was hyper-attuned to the way the mediums of painting and printed comics signify high art and popular culture, respectively. Across his oeuvre, he found playful ways to crisscross and destabilize those significations. Here he inserts a strip of holographic plastic into the landscape genre. Moving one’s head from side to side, the viewer can see an illusion of fish swimming in what seems to be a fish tank, positioned under waves bearing the artist’s signature Ben-Day dots. Through his use of hologram, Lichtenstein fuses three distinct notions of pictorial depth and illusionism, inviting the viewer’s engagement to activate the depicted underwater life.